A Village Affair

She signed the letter, 'With love from Alice'. When it was licked up and stamped, by James, they put Charlie into his pushchair and found Natasha, who was arranging her Cornish shells into an interminable exhibition all around the upstairs windowsills, and went down to the post. On the way they met Lettice Deverel who was very kind and ordinary and invited them to tea to meet the parrot. When they got home, Alice made cheese sandwiches for lunch and they ate them in the garden while the children talked about all the things they would do when Daddy and Clodagh came home again.

'Have you seen her?' Clodagh demanded.

Lettice held the telephone at a little distance from her ear.

'Yes. Yes, I have.'

'And? And?'

'We didn't speak of you, if that's what you mean.'

'How did she look?'

'A little tired. That's all.'

'Lettice,' Clodagh shouted. 'Lettice. How can you be so awful to me?'

There was a little silence. The parrot, across the kitchen, clucked approvingly at a grape it held.

'I used to think,' Lettice said, 'I used to think that you had promise and originality. And courage. Now I don't know. I'm more depressed by this episode than I can tell you. You seem to me like some kind of Hedda Gabler, all style and shallow selfishness.'

In London, sitting on her fortunate friends' sofa, Clodagh began to cry.

'Except you have a heart,' Lettice went on. 'I know that because I can see it's been touched. Oh, Clodagh dear, I do beg you to moke something of your life.'

'No!' said the parrot. 'No. No. No. Not pretty.'

It threw the grape stalk out of its cage.

'I can't give this up,' Clodagh said. 'I can't. I'll die.'

'On the contrary, you will live much better.'

'Is she missing me? Does she look as if she's missing me?'

'Don't ask me idiotic questions. Ask me how your poor parents are.'

'Well?'

'Much in need of hearing from you. You should have rung them, not me.'

'I couldn't ask them about Alice.'

'You shouldn't be asking anyone.'

'What about the children then? Did they mention me?'

'No. We only spoke of the parrot.'

'Oh, parrot,' said the parrot. 'Dear parrot. Dear me.'

Clodagh's voice grew small.

'I Jong to come down.'

'I dare say-'

'But I'm not crawling to anyone-'

'If you don't get off your bottom, Clodagh Unwin,' Lettice said, 'and make an independent decision, you'll find that Alice will probably have made them all for you.'

'What d'you mean? What's going on? What did

Alice-' 'I mean nothing, except that Alice has three children and no money of her own and can't fiddle-faddle around

like you can.'

'Has Martin been around?'

'No. He's living with a friend in Salisbury.'

'I'm coming down, damn what everyone thinks-'

'Think!' Lettice cried. Think! You try a little thinking.'

The parrot hooked its beak into the wires of its cage and began to haul itself up to the top. When it got there, it hung upside down for a bit and then it said, with great calm, 'Damn and blast.' Lettice began to laugh.

Delighted, it joined in, and Clodagh, hearing what appeared to be a roomful of merriment in Pitcombe, put the telephone down, in despair.

Martin was just waiting. He had stopped talking to anyone about Alice, particularly to Cecily. He had a very comfortable room in a friend's house on the edge of the Close in Salisbury, and he was working hard, and seeing his children once a week when Alice left them for him at The Grey House and went out, and he was making sure he played tennis a good deal and golf a bit, and he had accepted an invitation to stalk in Sutherland in October. He was making quiet plans to sell The Grey House. Whatever happened next, they couldn't possibly stay there.

Cornwall had restored him in some measure, certainly as to how he stood with his children. He liked being with them but was amazed at how much they needed done for them, how insatiable and helpless they were. Except for the brief time over Charlie's birth, he had never been responsible for them, a thing he didn't like but was perfectly prepared to do, if he had to. He felt perfectly prepared for a lot of things. That was the trouble, really, feeling like that. Nothing seemed violently upsetting any more or impossible to face or to be worth very much angst of any kind. When he tried to think what really mattered now, he couldn't. So he thought he would just get on with each day, as unremarkably and pleasantly as he could, and wait. In any case, if he waited, in the end it would be Alice who had to do something. And that would be only just. Wouldn't it?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

On Friday nights, Sam Meadows went to Salisbury's. He had grown rather to like the expedition because the store was full of people who had just finished work and who were full of a pre-weekend relief and excitement. As the years of his lone living went on, he found to his amusement that he was making sure he had no teaching commitments early on Friday evenings to get in the way of going to Salisbury's. He also noticed how he was beginning to buy the same things, whisky and white bread and black cherry jam and pasta and jars of pesto, and how he would make for the same check-out because there was such a dear little woman on the till, who ducked her head at him, bursting with half-hidden smiles.

Since he had left Elizabeth, a good many women had tried quite hard to live with him. He had let two of them begin but they had both had over-clear ideas about how life should be lived, and had been unable to keep those ideas to themselves. The only woman he had wanted, in ten years, to come and do whatever she liked with his life as long as she came, hadn't wanted to. She liked his bed, but preferred her own life outside it. Because of this, Sam had continued to love her and had stopped collecting his pupils like an array of Barbie dolls. They still flirted with him, particularly if essays were late, but these days he could just let them. In any case, the university now had a ferocious female Committee Against Sexual Harassment.

Sam had five years to go before he retired. When he retired, he thought he would go and live in Wales, preferably in a fishing community, and write a book on the power of language that would become an indispensable text book in schools. When he had done that, he would write fools' guides to the Bible and classical literature because he was still so exasperated, after thirty years of teaching, to find that clever modern students of literature were so ignorant of both that they couldn't get through a line of Milton without having to look up the references. After that, he thought he would probably die, and be buried in an austere Welsh hillside under the wheeling gulls. He didn't really want a headstone but he did want something to indicate that he had meant to be a poet, so that posterity should know that inside his apparently phlegmatic, idle, pleasure-seeking bulk, quite a lot of striving had gone on.

Standing in the Sainsbury's queue one August Friday, he was offered most of a very small, very wet dolly mixture by a gregarious baby in the child seat of the next trolley. He accepted it gratefully and ate it. It tasted of scented soap and reminded him of the sweets of his childhood. The baby reminded him of Charlie. Or rather, not of how Charlie looked, because Sam had only seen him once when he was too new to look like anything, but more that Charlie existed, that Sam had a baby grandson. In the early spring, Alice had sent Sam photographs of The Grey House and had said that it would all be ready for him, when he came for his annual summer visit. After that, he had heard nothing. He hadn't minded or noticed much, because he presumed that she had been too busy, and because he had been busy himself, but now, standing in the queue and smiling at the strange baby (it was not a pretty baby, it had a high domed forehead and its chin was glossy with dribble, but the gift of the dolly mixture had been true generosity in one so young), he thought that perhaps Alice's silence was beginning to have a flavour of oddness. Half the summer vacation had gone and she had not even telephoned. No more had he, he wasn't blaming her, but now that he thought about her, he found that he wanted to see her and his grandchildren. By the time he had got his groceries to the car, he wanted to see them very much indeed.